Timaeus
Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2016 10:22 pm
That dialogue by Plato. Those of you who read it, what do you think? Rubbish? Or was he on the right track?
Which bit? The story of Atlantis and the supposed ideal state of Athens is propagandist nonsense. The cosmology is demonstrably false and the physics archaic. Plato was probably right about a good story to account for the phenomena being the best you could hope for; that is basically Kant's view, and that of several stripes of antirealist. I also think he was on to something when he said that the demiurge created the sun and moon so that we could mark time, insofar as time is only a sequence of events. Aristotle said that Plato was alone in thinking so, though. It was one of the few dialogues available to Christendom until the Muslims kick started the renaissance by reintroducing the rest of Plato's surviving work, along with most of Aristotle's, so it was incredibly influential and you can see its footprint stomped all over Catholicism.Ansiktsburk wrote:That dialogue by Plato. Those of you who read it, what do you think? Rubbish? Or was he on the right track?